How to Use Pipedrive for Competitor Research

Most CRMs have to be persuaded to ask the competitive question. Pipedrive asks it unprompted: mark a deal lost and a box appears wanting to know why. That single interaction decides most of what follows, and it cuts both ways.

The upside is capture. A question asked at the moment of loss, in the flow of closing the record, gets answered far more often than a property somebody has to remember to scroll down to, which is the arrangement in most systems and the reason their competitor fields sit empty; the version of this problem in HubSpot is instructive, because there the question is never asked at all. Accounts here that have never had a competitive programme frequently turn out to hold two or three years of loss reasons, written at the time by the person who was there.

The downside is structure. Pipedrive documents freeform as the default for that box, so what has been accumulating is prose. It can be read one deal at a time and it cannot be counted, charted or trended, which is why so many accounts contain a great deal of competitive material and no competitive numbers at all. Everything on this page is about converting the first into the second without throwing away what makes the prose worth having.

1. 1Turn the freeform lost reason into a list. Pipedrive documents freeform as the default, so out of the box the field holds sentences nobody can aggregate. An admin sets the predefined list in company settings. Do this before anything else on this page: it costs twenty minutes and it is the difference between a year of readable losses and a year of prose.
2. 2Decide whether to keep the freeform option alongside the list. Pipedrive offers exactly that, and it is a real trade rather than an oversight. Allowing freeform captures the loss that does not fit any category, which is often the most interesting one, and it also gives every seller a way around the list. If you keep it, read what lands there each quarter and promote the recurring answers into options instead of letting the escape hatch become the default.
3. 3Add a separate field naming the competitor. The lost reason answers why, not who, and merging the two makes both uncountable. Add a Single option field holding a short controlled list of rivals plus no decision, internal build and other. Use Multiple options only if your deals genuinely run three ways, and accept that percentages will then need their denominator stated every time.
4. 4Require it on the stages where the answer exists. Pipedrive lets a required field apply to selected pipelines and stages rather than everywhere, which is exactly the control this needs. Require the competitor at the closing stages and the lost reason on loss, and leave earlier stages alone so people are not guessing at a shortlist nobody has settled.
5. 5Measure coverage before you report anything, and keep measuring it. Pipedrive states that required fields do not stop deals progressing when the update comes through an import, a bulk edit, the API, an automation or a third-party integration. So the rule is weaker than it looks, and the only honest check is the share of closed deals that actually carry a value. Publish that share at the top of every report you build from this field.

Pipedrive’s documentation on lost reasons is direct about it: by default the product is set to use freeform lost reasons. An account nobody has configured therefore collects sentences. Some of them are excellent sentences, written by somebody who had just spent six weeks on the deal, and none of them will ever appear in a chart.

An admin with deals permission turns on predefined reasons in company settings, replacing the open box with a list they define. That is the highest-return twenty minutes available in the product for competitive work, because the hard part was already solved: the prompt fires on its own and people answer it. Only the shape of the answer is missing.

The freeform escape hatch, and whether to keep it

Pipedrive offers an option to allow freeform reasons alongside the predefined ones, for losses that do not match anything on the list. It is worth treating that as a decision rather than a default, because it points in two directions at once.

• Keeping it preserves the interesting loss. The deal that fell over for a reason nobody anticipated is exactly the one a fixed list will file under other and bury. In a market that is changing, those entries are where the change shows up first.
• Keeping it also gives everybody a way past the list. A seller in a hurry types a phrase, and if that happens on a third of deals then the categories describe two thirds of your losses and nobody says so out loud.

The arrangement that works is to keep it on and treat the freeform entries as a queue rather than a leak. Read them once a quarter, promote whatever recurs into a real option, and watch the share of losses that took the escape hatch. A falling share means the list is getting better; a stable high share means the list does not describe your market.

Why the reason is not the competitor

The strong temptation, once the list exists, is to put competitor names in it. Resist it for the same arithmetic reason it fails everywhere: a list mixing price and timing with three company names can answer neither question, because some competitive losses were filed under a cause and some cause-driven losses were filed under a company. Two fields, one for who won and one for what the seller believes decided it, and the second stays useful precisely because it is labelled as a belief rather than a finding.

Pipedrive documents sixteen custom field types, and three of them can hold a competitor. They are not interchangeable, and the choice decides what every later report is capable of.

For most teams a single option field is the right default and the organization route is the upgrade once a handful of rivals recur often enough to deserve a record. Whichever you pick, cover the outcomes where no vendor won at all: no decision, an internal build, other. Read what lands in other each quarter: a name that keeps appearing there is a market entrant nobody has added yet, and that is the one competitive finding this system produces without being asked.

Requiring it where the answer exists

Pipedrive’s required fields can be applied to selected pipelines and stages rather than to everything, which is exactly the control this needs. Require the competitor at the closing stages and leave earlier ones alone. A field required at deal creation collects a guess, because the buyer has not settled a shortlist yet, and what it actually collects is whatever value sits at the top of the list. The feature is documented as available on Professional and higher under the older plan names, which map to Premium and above after the 2025 restructure.

The bypass that decides how much of your data is real

This is the sentence to carry away from the whole page. Pipedrive states that the required fields feature will not stop deals from progressing if the fields are updated via import, bulk editing, the API, automations or third-party integrations. Every one of those is common in an active account. So a rule that looks watertight in the interface can be walked around dozens of times a month, silently, and the report built on it will look exactly as confident as one built on complete data.

The only honest response is to measure rather than to infer. Of the deals closed in the period, what proportion have the competitor field set? Print that proportion above every chart you build here, permanently. It is the disclosure the analysis needs, and it also does more for adoption than any rule, because a completeness figure a sales director reads each quarter changes behaviour in a way a form warning never has.

The nine graded rows above, taken in the order they come into play when somebody actually sits down to do this work.

The question that asks itself

The lost reason prompt appears when a deal is marked lost and is the reason this field is populated more often here than elsewhere. Its value depends entirely on the next item. Predefined lost reasons, set by an admin in company settings, are what turn those answers into categories. The prompt supplies the capture rate and the list supplies the structure; neither is worth much without the other.

Three ways to name the rival

A single option field is the workhorse and what every chart will run on. A multiple options field is for accounts whose deals genuinely run three ways, at the price of arithmetic that needs explaining each time. An organization field promotes the competitor from a string to a record, which is what gives notes, contacts and files about a rival somewhere to live. Turning any of the three into a number is covered under CRM data.

The rule, and its documented gap

Required fields, per pipeline and per stage are the mechanism that decides coverage, and the granularity is genuinely useful because it lets the requirement land where the answer exists. The documented gap covered above, that imports, bulk edits, the API, automations and integrations pass straight through it, is what stops this being a guarantee and makes the coverage rate a permanent part of the reporting rather than a one-off check.

The history nobody has to type

Deal history and stage changes are written by the system, which puts them beyond the coverage problem entirely and makes them the one competitive measure here that nobody can distort by not filling in a form. How long deals sit, and in which stage, against a named rival set against your baseline, becomes readable on a fraction of the deals a win rate would require, and it moves earlier. Where the competitor field is patchy, this is what to reach for first.

Where the numbers get drawn

Insights deal performance reports are the charting layer, built from filters, a visual builder and a table view underneath. The tier rule covered in the next section governs which of those three parts your custom fields can reach, and it is the single most important thing to establish before promising anybody a dashboard.

The route out

The deal export is documented as covering deals along with leads, organizations, people, products and activities, in Excel or CSV, and as including default, custom and system fields together with ownership information. On the plans that cannot chart a custom field this is not a fallback, it is the method.

This step carries more weight in Pipedrive than in most CRMs, for a reason that is a tier rule rather than a preference. On the lower plans the export is where the competitive analysis happens, so it is worth building the sheet properly rather than treating it as a workaround.

The sheet, and the seven columns it needs

One row per closed deal. Close date, outcome, value, the competitor field, the lost reason, the pipeline the deal ran in, and the deal’s age at close. Seven columns supports every cut on this page and stays small enough that somebody will actually maintain it. Add the freeform reason as an eighth column if you kept it on, because reading those entries beside the categories is how you find out whether the list is describing your market. Those columns are laid out ready in the competitor tracking spreadsheet for anyone who would rather start from a file than a blank grid.

Two routes to the file

From an Insights report, open it and scroll to the table view at the bottom, choose the columns with the gear icon and export as XLSX or CSV. Charts and dashboards themselves come out as PDF or PNG, useful for circulating a conclusion and useless for interrogating one. From the deals list, a straight data export returns everything including custom fields. Prefer the second for anything you intend to pivot, because it carries the raw values rather than whatever the report had already grouped.

What the coverage rate does to the pivot

Compute it in the sheet before anything else: the share of closed deals carrying a competitor value. Under roughly half, every rate and trend you might draw from the field describes whoever bothered to complete it rather than your business, and there is no statistical repair for that. Put the figure in the first cell anybody reads. One line, and it stops the most familiar failure in this kind of reporting, which is a confident percentage computed across a self-selected slice.

The stream that does not wait for a loss

Everything on this page is triggered by a deal ending, which is the structural problem with the whole source. A competitive intelligence platform is the standing answer to that: it runs against the CRM and files what a rival published while deals are still open, so the evidence is not hostage to somebody closing a record. It changes nothing about your lost reasons, and it is not meant to. It fills the months in between them.

The rule that decides where the analysis happens

Pipedrive documents it precisely: only Premium and higher plans can use custom fields for filtering and building reports in the visual builder, covering the measure by, group by and segment by controls, while all users can use custom fields in the table view. So on Lite and Growth your competitor field can be created, required and filled in, and the only place you will ever see it is a column in the table underneath a report, or in an export. That is not a blocker. It moves the analysis into a spreadsheet, which is where most of it was going to end up anyway.

The allowances worth checking before you propose anything

Pipedrive publishes its usage limits per plan. Custom fields run thirty on Lite, one hundred on Growth, three hundred on Premium and five hundred on Ultimate. Insights reports run fifteen, fifty, two hundred and fifty and five hundred per user across the same ladder, and additional dashboards are documented as Premium and above. This method needs two fields, so the allowance is rarely the constraint. It is still worth a look, because an account near its ceiling turns a five minute change into a negotiation about which existing field to retire.

Permissions, and why two people get different files

Only global admins and users with the right permission enabled can export, and exporting by data type is documented as global admin only. More subtly, what you get is scoped to what you can already see under your visibility group, so two people exporting the same view can produce genuinely different files without either of them noticing. Agree who runs the quarterly export and have the same person run it every time, or your trend line will contain a step change that is really a change of author. Exported files stay available for twenty-eight days, so download rather than relying on the link.

The plan names changed, and the help centre remembers both

The plans are Lite, Growth, Premium and Ultimate following a restructure in 2025, replacing Essential, Advanced, Professional and Power, and Enterprise respectively. Older help articles still name the previous tiers, which is why the required-fields documentation says Professional and higher while the reporting documentation says Premium and higher. Those are the same tier. Check the mapping rather than assuming two different gates.

Nothing here was obtained from anybody, so the usual provenance questions fall away. The one that replaces them is peculiar to this product: its most-used competitive field is an open text box shown to somebody in the minute after they lost. That is the least considered writing anyone does all week, and it lands in a record that gets exported wholesale, kept indefinitely and read by everybody with a seat.

• The freeform box exports with everything else. A sentence typed in frustration about a named rival travels into every spreadsheet anybody makes from that point on. If you keep freeform enabled, say so to the team and say what it is for: what the buyer told you, not what you think of the competitor.
• A competitor organization is still an organization. Creating one puts a rival into the same database as your customers, where it can be filtered, emailed and reported on by anybody. Exclude it explicitly from every list and campaign at the moment you create it, and verify the exclusion rather than trusting it.
• Visibility groups do not make a note private. A record you cannot see today becomes visible the moment somebody adjusts a group or moves a deal, and exports follow whoever runs them. Write on the assumption that the audience is the whole company rather than the pipeline you own.

The rest is the boundary that applies to any system of record. A rival’s own documents stay out of the account however they reached you, people employed by a competitor are personal data with no analytical value, and anything a rival told you directly about where their prices are going is a difficulty in your process well before it is one in your records.

The account holds deals you were in. A rival spends most of their existence outside your pipeline, and none of that leaves a trace here. Four gaps, and something better to read for each.

• Where they are expanding. A move into a new segment or country shows up in the roles they are recruiting for, in enough detail to plan against, months before it reaches one of your deals. The method is under competitor hiring.
• What their customers say afterwards. The account records the buyers who came to you. Those who went to the rival and later wished they had not say so in public, which is what review sites.
• Whether they are actually growing. Losing three deals in a quarter feels like a rival on the rise and is a sample of three. Independent measures of a company’s reach are worked through under competitor website traffic.
• What they have committed to publicly. Announcements are dated, deliberate and written under review, which makes them a far better record of a rival’s intentions than anything a buyer paraphrased in a call. That reading is covered under press releases.

There is also a gap peculiar to a system built around a loss prompt. Everything competitive here is triggered by an ending, so an account that is winning tells you almost nothing, and a rival who is beating you in deals you are never invited to produces no record at all. Silence in this system is genuinely ambiguous and should never be read as safety.

Three jobs on three separate clocks. Fold them into a single quarterly sitting and the whole practice quietly stops by the third quarter, which is what usually happens.

Monthly, read the freeform lost reasons. It takes twenty minutes, it is the only place a new competitor or a new objection will surface without anybody having predicted it, and it is the step that keeps the predefined list honest. Anything that appears three times becomes an option.

Quarterly, export, compute the coverage rate, produce the counts with their denominators beside them, and circulate the result to the people filling in the field. That last part is the whole maintenance mechanism. Data nobody is ever shown back stops being entered within two quarters, whatever the validation says, and the only thing that reverses it is a team seeing a decision that went differently because of what they typed.

Off cycle, reopen on three triggers. A rival appears in a pipeline they had never touched. The somebody edits the predefined list, after which every value already stored means something slightly different and no trace of the change survives anywhere. Or somebody bulk-updates deals, imports a batch or switches on a new integration, because each of those routes is documented as passing straight through the required field rule and each will quietly put a hole in the coverage you had just finished measuring.

Every competitive field in this account is written at the moment a deal stops. The reason is captured on loss, the competitor is confirmed at close, the cycle length is only calculable once there is an end date. The deals that are still open, where a rival is right now saying something your team has not heard before, carry no competitive record by construction. So the picture is always assembled from finished business, and by the time it is complete enough to chart, the quarter it describes is over and the decisions it might have informed have been made.

The bill for that is specific. A rival moves their entry price or rewrites their pitch in February, your sellers meet it in March without being told it is new, and the pattern surfaces in your reporting in July. What fixes it is a second stream of evidence that no deal has to end to produce, which is precisely what competitive intelligence software provides. Flares files a rival’s move in the week they make it rather than the quarter you close against it, so the March conversation gets the February fact. Nothing it produces replaces what somebody typed into the prompt. Which deals were contested, what they were worth and what the seller believed at the end are yours alone, and they are what turns an outside change into a decision.